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4. FILE DELIMITERS

Three events have a very special meaning.

Event <0,1> means Begin Of Data and should be inserted anytime the data collection is started. At the very begin of the file the special triple <0,1,0> should be inserted.

Event <0,2> means End Of Data and should be inserted anytime the data collection is stopped.

These two codes are very useful if the data in the file are not continuously collected, but made of many runs of data streams.

The code <0,FFFF> is reserved to state the End Of File. Note that while all other event qualifiers can have any number of (hexadecimal) digits the end of file code is specified as having 4 digits exactly. Anything that appears in the file after the time delay associated with <0,FFFF> is ignored. Notice that if the end of file code <0,FFFF> is not preceded by the end of data collection code <0,2>, it is assumed that data was collected up to the end of the file. That is, two files that end by:

      ...
      3,1,67
      0,FFFF,29

and

      ...
      3,1,67
      0,2,29
      0,FFFF,0


are equivalent but the second form is preferable because more explicit.

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